Publications / 2020 Proceedings of the 37th ISARC, Kitakyushu, Japan
Lighting performance simulators play an important role in the architectural design process, as it provides the means to address lighting design issues early within the design stage of a construction project life-cycle. Currently, several lighting performance simulators provide support for glare simulation and analysis; however, they are primarily limited to two-dimensional desktop displays and not capable of simulating glare in real-time. Furthermore, the quantitative data produced from these simulators consist of reports, complex numerical data-sets, two-dimensional graphs, and charts, which creates a divergence between the data produced and the three-dimensional context of the building. As a result, analysis of glare data generally requires specialists such as experienced architects who have an extensive background in interpreting these two-dimensional data-sets. In order to overcome the aforementioned issues, we present VRGlare: an immersiveVirtualReality lighting performance simulator capable of real-time glare simulation and analysis. In addition to semi-realistic lighting renderings, this research proposes four visualisation techniques to represent glare within an immersive three-dimensional context. We also present two multi-sensory approaches designed to re-create the physical discomfort that occurs when experiencing glare. This paper provides an overview of the developed simulator which includes the hardware, software, algorithms, visualisations, and multi-sensory representation of glare discomfort.